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For Homesick Russian Tycoon, Instant of Ruin Came in Court

Boris A. Berezovsky, center, in London last August after he lost a $5.1 billion lawsuit against a former associate. Facing millions in legal bills, he began to divest himself of the assets he had acquired so proudly.Credit
Andrew Cowie/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

LONDON — The moment of ruin for Boris A. Berezovsky, the exiled Russian oligarch who was found dead on Saturday outside London, came not when he fell out with the Kremlin, or when his latest long-term relationship broke up, or even when Russia sentenced him to prison in absentia.

It came instead in an unremarkable courtroom in London last August, when a judge told him exactly why his $5.1 billion lawsuit against Roman A. Abramovich, a former business associate, had failed so badly.

As Mr. Berezovsky — a man once so powerful he brokered national elections and treated multibillion-dollar companies as personal cash machines — looked on, stunned, the judge called him “dishonest,” “unimpressive” and “inherently unreliable.”

She said he had invented evidence, contradicted himself and made up his story as he went along. And, perhaps most devastating to a man whose inflated self-belief was nearly all he had left, she said he had “deluded himself into believing his own version of events.”

It is still unclear how Mr. Berezovsky, 67, died. The police said Sunday that they were treating his death as “unexplained.” But what is certain is that the humiliating court ruling, the rapid dissolution of his once-vast fortune, and a dawning realization that he would never see his homeland again had driven Mr. Berezovsky into despair. He had lived large for so long, it seemed, he did not know how to live small.

“He was so much distressed and depressed, and in so much trouble, as a result of that court ruling,” Alex Goldfarb, a longtime associate and former employee, said in an interview. “He thought this verdict had destroyed him, effectively.”

Mr. Berezovsky’s body was found, the police said, by an employee on Saturday afternoon on the floor of a bathroom at the house where he was living in Ascot, an upscale London suburb. The door had been locked from the inside, and the police said they were withholding “some details” until after the post-mortem, to give the family “time to speak to younger family members,” including, presumably, the last two of the six children he had with two successive wives and one longtime girlfriend.

According to a person with knowledge of the details, Mr. Berezovsky left no suicide note. But because nothing to do with him was ever simple, elaborate theories are being circulated. That the stress of the last few months had brought on a fatal heart attack. That, despondent over the loss of his money, prestige and homeland, Mr. Berezovsky had killed himself. That he had been murdered, just as his friend and fellow exile Alexander V. Litvinenko had been (in his case, by polonium poisoning) in 2006. Police officers trained in radiological forensics even searched the house and surroundings for evidence of chemical, radiological or biological material, but came up with nothing.

On Sunday afternoon, the police said they had found no evidence “to suggest third-party involvement,” but The Guardian quoted a friend of Mr. Berezovsky’s as saying that a scarf had been found near his body and speculating that he had been strangled.

Adding to the confusion, a spokesman for the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, said Saturday night that several months ago, Mr. Berezovsky had sent the president a letter in which he “admitted that he made a lot of mistakes” and begged for permission to return home. The Kremlin has produced no evidence of such a letter, but Mr. Berezovsky, one of Mr. Putin’s bitterest critics-in-exile, had certainly begun to speak in recent days of a deep homesickness.

“The last time I spoke with him, I was amazed: it was as if life had left him,” Mikhail Kozyrev, a television reporter who had worked with Mr. Berezovsky for years and talked with him a few weeks ago, said on the Russian channel Dozhd on Saturday. He said Mr. Berezovsky quizzed him about what had changed in stylish parts of Moscow, even asking what restaurants had opened.

“He had suddenly lost hope that he would at some point see again the homeland he loved,” Mr. Kozyrev said.

Photo

Boris A. Berezovsky was found dead near London.Credit
Olivia Harris/Reuters

Mr. Berezovsky’s reputation for extravagance started after the Soviet Union fell and all of Russia seemed up for grabs. Backed by the Russian president at the time, Boris N. Yeltsin — whom he in turn helped prop up — Mr. Berezovsky began a series of investments and maneuvers in businesses involving cars, oil, media and airplanes. Court papers in his case with Mr. Abramovich, who remained in good favor with the Kremlin even as Mr. Berezovsky fell out with it later on, showed how both played fast and loose with money, cutting under-the-table deals, paying bribes and protection money, blackmailing and bullying their way into new ventures.

Most Russian oligarchs tend to end up acquiescing to the Kremlin, or else are killed, jailed, or exiled into oblivion. But Mr. Berezovsky’s life simply unraveled.

He fled Russia in 2000, facing the prospect of imprisonment on fraud charges. Despite Mr. Putin’s best efforts, Mr. Berezovsky managed to hang on to a considerable portion of his $3 billion fortune — or at least to live as though he had. He appears to have been bankrolled, at least for a time, by his later nemesis: Mr. Abramovich said in court papers that he paid many of Mr. Berezovsky’s bills and gave him $305 million to “establish himself properly abroad.”

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His tastes ran to private planes, big cars, big houses and expensive wines. In 2001, he bought a 215-acre estate in Surrey after, he said, a marathon drinking session in which he successfully persuaded the owner to sell it for $20 million. When he went to London, he traveled in a convoy that included his $600,000 Maybach sedan and a second car containing his French bodyguards. In 2006, he celebrated his 60th birthday at Blenheim Palace, one of England’s largest country houses and the birthplace of Winston Churchill. From his office in Mayfair, he directed anti-Putin activities, keeping the drapes drawn to discourage snipers and other ill-wishers.

In 2008, High Court hearings began in the lawsuit against Mr. Abramovich, who owns the Chelsea soccer club. In the suit, Mr. Berezovsky accused Mr. Abramovich of cheating him out of his multibillion-dollar share of a Russian oil company.

After the case failed, financial and personal losses piled up.

Mr. Berezovsky was ordered by the court to pay more than $53 million to cover Mr. Abramovich’s legal bills. He owed millions of dollars to his own lawyers. Facing more court battles and huge alimony and child-support bills after the dissolution of his relationship with his longtime companion, Mr. Berezovsky began divesting himself of the assets he had acquired so proudly and so offhandedly.

He sold his mansion in Surrey. He fired his two drivers. He mortgaged his villas in Cap d’Antibes and Cap Ferrat on the French Mediterranean. He gave up his handsome offices in Mayfair and his beloved Maybach. He told Mr. Litvinenko’s widow, whom he had been helping to support since her husband’s death, that he could no longer pay her lawyers. He sold off a Picasso and a Warhol.

He was in “terrible, terrible condition: he was practically broke, selling paintings and other things,” Alexander Dobrovinsky, a lawyer who had represented Mr. Berezovsky and was one of the first to confirm his death, told the Russian television station Rossiya 24. Mutual friends, he added, recently told him that Mr. Berezovsky had recently “asked them for $5,000 for a ticket to fly somewhere.”

When he died, he seems to have been alone in the house, except for the employee who — worried after not seeing his boss since 10:30 the night before — finally found his body on Saturday afternoon.

On Friday, Mr. Berezovsky gave what would prove to be his final interview, to a columnist for the Russian edition of Forbes Magazine. (The columnist, Ilya Zhegulev, said the conversation had been off the record but that he felt “obligated” to publish an article after Mr. Berezovsky’s death.)

In the article, Mr. Berezovsky comes across as wistful, nostalgic and deeply sad. He says that his recent experiences have forced him to re-evaluate his beliefs about the West and about Russia.

“I don’t want anything more than to return to Russia,” he said. He had failed to understand when he left that “Russia is so dear to me, and that I cannot be an emigrant.”

He said he was at a loss to imagine the future. “I don’t know what I should do,” he is quoted as saying. “I’m 67 years old. And I don’t know what I should do next.”

Reporting was contributed by Stephen Castle from Ascot, England; Alan Cowell from Venice; David M. Herszenhorn and Andrew Roth from Moscow; and Michael Schwirtz from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on March 25, 2013, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: For Homesick Russian Tycoon, Instant of Ruin Came in Court. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe